In your hosting account, you will find two stats packages – Awstats and Webalizer. I prefer Awstats. The best package though is Google Analytics. This service is free through Google, but some code needs to be installed on your website (which we can do for $35).

There are some basic concepts you need to understand to make sense of these stats.

No of visits – no of visitor sessions during that month – so this is the total no of visits to your website.

Pages – No of pages that has been viewed. So, if one person views 3 pages, then it is 1 visit and 3 pages.

Hits – completely useless info – counts the no of files that have been accessed (each page may be made up of say 5 -10 files).

Bandwidth – the total amt of data that has been downloaded. So, if each page is on average, 100kb, and you have had 100 visitors accessing (on average) 3 pages each, then you would expect the bandwidth to be 30,000kb (30MB).

The other bit of info that is important is No of Unique Visitors – this is the no of actual people that have visited the site during the month (no of visits will allow for someone who makes a repeat visit – which would count as one unique visitor, but two visits).